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Our students’ summer contributions to the lab

It’s time for a well overdue thank you to all of our student volunteers for their contributions to the lab over the summer. This year, instead of offering standard work experience to two or three students, as we have done in the past, we decided to ask our Student Panel members for help with a number of tasks that would be beneficial to both them and us. An experimental approach but it worked even better than we had hoped! So, many thanks to:

Lottricia Millett, Lily Groom, Morgan Walker, Reef Ronel, David Launer, Casril Liebert and Ashleigh Francis for writing summaries of published research papers from the lab. All of these summaries (which were of a very high quality!) are published here on the blog as well as being displayed in the patient waiting area of the department. A number of them have also been sent out to the patients and healthy volunteers who took part in those studies to inform them of the findings of the research to which they contributed. Feeding back results of studies to participants is really important, and it’s great to be able to send these summaries out to people. We also hope that the students will be able to use these summaries to demonstrate their skills when attending for university interviews and suchlike.

Kiki Riad-Forbes and Banke Faboyede for revamping the display board in our patient waiting area. The display has photos of the researchers in the department and information about the different types of research everyone does, plus links to this blog and our Facebook & Twitter accounts. We see a lot of people reading the information while they’re waiting so the eye-catching display is definitely doing its job!

Miki Friend, Asha Omar, Kiki Riad-Forbes, Banke Faboyede and Muska Yarzi for putting together a database of all of Alan and Vicky’s previous research participants and sending a huge mailshot to them all with the summaries of the studies for which they volunteered. This wasn’t the most interesting of jobs, involving lots of typing, printing, sorting piles of paper, and stuffing envelopes but was a task that probably just wouldn’t have happened otherwise. After some delays with a new postal system at King’s we’ve just sent out 216 A4 envelopes, with a few more to go out in due course.

Neta Fibeesh, Abi Mincer and Ma’ayan Dee, for writing a summary of Arietta Spinou’s PhD thesis studies, which again will be sent out to her patient participants to inform them of the outcome of the research. The nature of Arietta’s research is a bit different to the types of studies that most people are familiar with, so Neta, Abi and Ma’ayan did very well to summarise these studies in a way that’s accessible to people with no scientific background.

Ibtissam Adem and Deeqa Mohamed, for producing a great video of the SkinSuit study being undertaken at the KCL London Bridge campus with PhD student Phil Carvil and MSc student Alex Sehgal under Ged’s supervision. Not only did they film it in great detail, they took a lot of time to ensure they understood all of the complex science of both the suit (designed to mimic the some of the effects of gravity when astronauts are in space) and the measurements being made. The video will be a great resource for a lot of people.

So we think that’s a pretty decent summer of work! It has been wonderful to partner with our Student Panel members and we have been very impressed with the quality of the work they’ve all produced. We’re already looking forward to what achievements next summer will bring!